Nerd Notes

As always, there is someone in the Rails community that has made Elasticsearch much easier to use in the context of a standard application. I decided to use the Searchkick, which was created by the developers at Instacart to help customers sort through a ton of groceries. Searchkick is a Ruby gem that runs on top of Elasticsearch and makes it easy to make searches in a Rails-friendly fashion...

The step that often trips me up is what to do with photo uploading. In this case, I was in a situation where I wanted the user to be able to choose a file, preview it, and then submit it when they are ready. In addition, this whole form would have to be submitted through AJAX so that we could continue the user flow and move on to the final step of the on-boarding process. I wanted the easiest and least server-intensive way to do this, while still making it easy for the user...

Stripe somewhat recently launched Stripe Connect, which allows users to connect to applications using OAuth strategies. It's kind of like the "Connect/Login with Facebook" buttons you see all over the internet, but for bank accounts. We decided to have every user sign in with their bank account in order to easily standardize payments...

Every week of the 20/20 challenge, I’ll be noting some of the top coding highlights and offering small tips & tricks. Feel free to ask questions in the comments/the twitter/email/etc.

For those of who that are interested, OddJob U was made on Ruby on Rails, using pgSQL. We're hosting this app, and most likely all of our apps, on Heroku. They have a free tier for apps that can be scaled when needed, and they save us a lot of money and time.